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4GB of RAM on a Pentium 4 mobo

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First post, by kahuna

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Dear Vogon people,

One of the retro systems I'm building is based on a Pentium 4 3.2GHz Northwood and a Gigabyte GA-8S655FX-L ver. 1.0 (SiS based motherboard).
I also got two sticks of 1GB Corsair Pro DDR400 (black) and two sticks of 1GB Corsair Platinum. Both of them are CL2 and for what I read, they are the same memory modules, the only difference is the colour of the heatsink.

The issue is that when I connect the four sticks for a total of 4GB of RAM, my PC starts beeping constantly and it will not POST.

Things I've tried:
- 2 black sticks = works, dual channel enabled
- 2 platinum sticks = works, dual channel enabled
- 1 platinum stick + 1 black stick = works, dual channel enabled
- 2 platinum sticks + 1 black stick = works, single channel (3GB)
- different combinations with 4 sticks like: black - platinum - black - platinum // black - black - platinum - platinum
- all of the above configuring the BIOS in Auto (so it will use CL3 timings)
- probably other combinations I don't recall...

I also tested the memory modules with memtest86, they passed, no issues. The motherboard BIOS is the latest available.

Attached to this post you can find a picture of these memory modules. The other two are exactly the same, same references on the stickers.

Is this a limitation of the motherboard? I don't think I need an x86-64 CPU to address 4GB of RAM (i.e. a late Prescott in this case), right? Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks!

Be free!

Reply 1 of 4, by aaron158

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according to the specs it should support 4 gigs with 4 1 gb sticks. u try to get 4 matched sticks.

but really if 3 sticks work probably easier just to stick with that i mean chances are u going to be using a 32 bit os? witch will only let u use 3.2 gigs of the 4 gigs anyway.

Reply 2 of 4, by rasz_pl

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I wouldnt lose sleep over this. The max you could get is 3.5GB anyway because motherboard needs to reserve memory space for PCI/AGP resources anyway.
Have you tested all 4 memory slots? Maybe try 2x1 + 2x512? P4 motherboard makes me think capacitors, maybe ram supply is tired and needs some love.

Open Source AT&T Globalyst/NCR/FIC 486-GAC-2 proprietary Cache Module reproduction

Reply 3 of 4, by TrashPanda

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aaron158 wrote on 2022-12-21, 23:23:

according to the specs it should support 4 gigs with 4 1 gb sticks. u try to get 4 matched sticks.

but really if 3 sticks work probably easier just to stick with that i mean chances are u going to be using a 32 bit os? witch will only let u use 3.2 gigs of the 4 gigs anyway.

Northwood was 32bit only, it didn't support x64 so it cant run 64bit windows or any other 64bit OS thus 4gb of addressable ram was the limit and the GPU had to be mapped into that limit so the OS only had 3.5gb avaliable.

x64 wasn't supported by the Pentium 4 till late Prescott 1M and even then there were only a few models.

Reply 4 of 4, by LSS10999

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I recall having seen an i865 board that do not work with any dual-channel configuration (like 2x1GB, 4x1GB). It simply would not POST, end of story. The component the board uses may lead to such result, though normally a board should be able to POST with any configuration regardless...

The board in question, however, would POST with any single-channel configuration just fine, namely 3x1GB + 1x512MB. If you have some smaller spare sticks you may try creating such artificial single channel configurations to see if the board POSTs that way.

And yeah, for these chipsets you certainly can only use about 3.5GB of RAM provided you use 128MB or less AGP Aperture Size. Setting it to 256MB may further reduce available RAM to 3.25GB. It's a chipset limitation and doesn't really have much to do with whether the CPU supports EM64T or not.

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